Are You Part of TV World (A Different Way to Get the News)
March 21st, 2014 // 12:01 pm @ Oliver DeMille
Where to Look
I keep getting asked what I read to study current events. I actually taught a whole class on this recently—and it’s still available. By taking this class, you’ll get the real scoop on the best current events publications.
In this article, I’ll just share the Cliff’s Notes version. Read Foreign Affairs, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and The Economist.
There. That’s it.
Enjoy.
But there is a deeper way to think about this. To begin, there is actually a bit of a problem with the question itself: “What should I read to study current events?” The real answer is, “Everything.” Read a lot. If you’re conservative, read conservative and liberal publications. If you’re liberal, read liberal and conservative periodicals. You can’t study current events from one political view—not if you want to really know what’s happening.
Compare and Contrast
This goes for television and radio as well. When I watch a certain event to see how it is reported in the news, I always see what MSNBC and Fox News both have to say. Then I watch CNN and one of the networks, usually ABC or CBS, for their views as well. Bloomberg Television, C-Span, and PBS news shows often add interesting nuances.
But reading is better than watching. The NY Times and Wall Street Journal are fun to compare. USA Today and various online thought leaders share vital out-of-the-box insights. I could go on and on. Read. Read a lot. Read more.
But that’s only half of the message. The other half is a bit counter-intuitive, but it is still very important.
One of the problems with looking for one or two publications to read is that it limits us to one or two publications. This brings us to the main point: It is a major problem when we only get our news from news outlets.
To really know what’s going on in our world, you have to get beyond the news. Behind the news, under the news. You have to feel what the people are feeling, and dig to get a sense of what is happening in their culture. Their daily lives.
Culture and Events
To do this, I read lots of non-news publications. They are incredibly insightful. I read men’s magazines (like Men’s Health, Esquire, GQ, etc.), women’s magazines (Vanity Fair, More, Good Housekeeping, etc.), variety magazines (Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Via), cultural magazines (The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Harper’s, etc.), specialty magazines (Harvard Business Review, Guns and Ammo, Yoga Journal, etc.), science magazines (Psychology Today, Prevention, Popular Science, etc.), and more. These teach as much about current events as any news publication.
For example, I like to go to Barnes and Noble and grab a copy of Yoga Journal, Guns and Ammo, Entertainment Weekly, and Harvard Business Review. Then I read the main articles in each, in one sitting. It’s fascinating. These four publications are written to very different audiences, as you might have gathered, and they use different vocabularies, examples, assumptions, and writing styles. Yet all are quality publications with important articles. Add TV Guide to these four and you’ve got a manual on current America—like it or not.
Together they give the reader a cross-section insight into current events, much more than you could get by concurrently reading a top conservative magazine (say, The Weekly Standard) and liberal periodical (for example, The Nation). The ads in each of these four magazines listed above teach almost as much, sometimes more, than the articles. Reading non-news publications along with news is the key to really understanding current events.
Take off the Rose Glasses
Really. It is important, however, to read them differently than typical readers. Don’t read non-news periodicals looking for literal news. Read them to see what things they talk about that are newsworthy. Read like an anthropologist, looking for interesting trends and groups in modern society that could influence the world.
And think, think deeply, while you read. What does each article say (implicitly as well as explicitly) about our modern society? What trends does it portend? What assumptions does each author make about our current world, and what does this tell you about our culture?
Become a voracious reader. Turn TV World into Thinking World, at least in your own life. Oh, and ask the same kinds of questions when/if you watch television. We live in an Information Age, but we need more people who treat it like a Thinking Age.
Oliver DeMille is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling co-author of LeaderShift: A Call for Americans to Finally Stand Up and Lead, the co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.
Among many other works, he is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, The Coming Aristocracy, and FreedomShift: 3 Choices to Reclaim America’s Destiny.
Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.
Category : Blog &Culture &Current Events &Education &Generations &Information Age &Statesmanship
Why Do We Keep Losing the Freedom Battle?
March 20th, 2014 // 3:00 pm @ Oliver DeMille
Two Avenues of Destruction
Why does government keep growing, no matter who we elect, no matter which party is in charge? 
Why do freedom lovers, those who truly want limited, Constitutional government, continue to lose the battle?
There are two answers. First, the freedom battle loses—year after year, election after election, decade after decade—because it is poorly funded. The political parties are well funded, mind you, but neither party truly stands for freedom. Freedom lovers lose because they are underfunded, pure and simple. More on this below.
Second, those who stand for freedom lose the battle to bigger government because the regular people can’t see what is happening. We don’t see armed troops in jackboots marching daily through our streets, entering our homes, and stealing our property and lives.
When the people can’t see this happening, it’s hard for them to get too excited about it. They don’t know what to fight against. They don’t know who the enemy is. They aren’t sure who to fight, or how to fight them.
The Paper Sword
We don’t realize that Soft Power attacks (certain licensing requirements, regulations, agency policies, commercial codes, revenue bills, statutory changes, executive orders, secret agency procedures, exemptions, ex post facto decisions, and court cases) are as dangerous to freedom as Hard Power attacks (invading armies, armed rebellions, political officials with their own armies, or government use of force against its own people).
In history, the regular people often respond to Hard Power attacks on freedom, but they seldom even notice Soft Power attacks until their freedoms are too far gone to recover.
Citizens of nations almost never realize it when Soft Power is attacking them. The biggest irony of this is that throughout human history Soft Power has taken away more freedom than Hard Power. In fact, Hard Power is seldom used until Soft Power has weakened a nation.
Today, we are witnessing a wholesale reduction of our freedoms—nearly all through Soft Power attacks that few people notice.
To See and Understand
As one insightful friend wrote to me in an email: “We don’t know who or what to fight against. I still believe the majority of Americans value freedom… We, as a culture, do not know how to defend freedom in this new age of information, nor do we know who or what to defend it from. All the average citizen sees—or is supposed to see—is things going a little darker, a little dirtier, a little more crowded, each day. There is, for most Westerners in any case, no force-of-state brutes-in-boots and uniforms…. We see only the results of class stratification and economic divergence…. The most dangerous enemy is the one you can’t see.”
Americans would stand up and vote to get their freedoms back, if only they understand how much they are under attack.
If they could see their freedoms being stolen by Hard Power attacks at the level that they are truly under siege from Soft Power, they’d change things—and fast.
But the regular people don’t see, because Soft Power is used behind-the-scenes, on paper.
How to Win It
This is why only a nation of voracious readers can maintain its freedoms. This brings us back to the first reason freedom is losing: underfunding.
Not only do we need a nation of voracious readers, we need a lot of successful businessmen, professionals, entrepreneurs, and others of means to fund freedom—to fund those things that help the regular people see and understand the impact of Soft Power.
This is the current battle for the future of freedom.
1. Will people of means fund effective responses to Soft Power attacks on our freedom?
2. Enough to win the battle?
3. ill enough regular people take entrepreneurial action and become people of means?
On these three questions turn our future.
Which of these three battles are you helping fight?
Oliver DeMille is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling co-author of LeaderShift: A Call for Americans to Finally Stand Up and Lead, the co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.
Among many other works, he is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, The Coming Aristocracy, and FreedomShift: 3 Choices to Reclaim America’s Destiny.
Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.
Category : Aristocracy &Business &Citizenship &Community &Constitution &Current Events &Economics &Entrepreneurship &Government &Leadership &Liberty &Mini-Factories &Mission &Politics &Statesmanship
What Russia Is Up To -or- The Election of 2016 Predicted
March 18th, 2014 // 10:04 am @ Oliver DeMille
Understanding Putin
When Mitt Romney said during the 2012 presidential campaign that Russia is America’s biggest international foe, President Obama and the entire national security establishment laughed and poked fun at him.
They collectively called his views outdated. Quaint. Out of touch.
Nobody’s laughing today. The experts were wrong. Romney was right. Moreover, he did something that may be the most important trait for a U.S. president to display: he read foreign leaders correctly. Despite the experts, even in the face of widespread ridicule, he understood Putin.
In contrast, President Obama has proven that this is a major weakness of his leadership. Reading Putin wrong is a serious problem. Obama read Putin wrong during the Syria crisis, when deciding whether or not to remove strategic missiles from Eastern Europe, regarding Iran, on harboring Snowden, and most recently during the Crimean emergency.
President Obama warned Putin that there would “be consequences” for Russia if it pursued these power grabs. But so far this has been mostly bluster, hardly any meaningful consequences.
Clearly Putin has read Obama right: a politician, someone who thinks words matter more than might, a head of state who shies away from real conflict, a president who will back down in the face of actual force.
Putin’s policy has been to nod, agree, and make nice when words are at play, then to stay silent and let the politicians debate and posture while the troops march in. He has does this in each of the cases mentioned above.
Putin isn’t a politician, not in the Western sense. He is an old KGB operative, trained and conditioned that physical actions speak louder than words. He is convinced that the Obama Administration will rise to mere words when a debate is needed, but back down from physical force.
Putin is also following the old KGP agenda of reestablishing the Russian empire—one piece at a time. For Putin, it’s two steps forward, one step forward.
Looking the Wrong Way
Meanwhile, the NSA and other agencies under Obama’s watch use massive resources spying on Americans, resources that could be utilized spying on Russia and other true security threats.
The clip of President Obama telling Putin that he’d have more flexibility to work with Russia once he won the 2012 election has been played repeatedly. Since it was captured on an open mike blunder when Obama didn’t realize he was on the air, it has fueled numerous conspiracy theories.
But few have pointed out perhaps the most interesting part of this clip: the look on Putin’s face.
The operative, the bully, the bad cop, realizing that his biggest foe, the American president, is a talker above all, that he wants to be liked, that his words don’t directly correlate with his action.
That he can be swayed, even shocked, by violence.
That raw physical force is outside his comfort zone.
That he probably won’t pull the trigger unless he can be almost entirely sure that the other guy can’t fight back.
Is this what Putin was thinking?
Whether or not this is actually President Obama’s character, it is clearly how Putin has sized him up.
They’re Not Playing Games
The Administration makes war on Fox News, Edward Snowden, Ted Cruz, Bill O’Reilly, anti-Obama Care Republicans, or conservative groups seeking IRS approvals, but Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Putin get to do whatever they want.
Putin has apparently decided that he can operate without any real opposition from the White House. No discussion, no diplomacy, no talk needed, until the power has been wielded.
Afterword, once the troops have done their work, Obama will be only too happy to talk with Putin, to smooth things over, to declare “peace in our time” based on nice words and promises.
For Putin, Obama is Neville Chamberlain, so interested in peaceful words that they can be used after aggression to cover any sin. No need for permission when apologies will suffice.
While the phrase “Putin is playing chess while Obama is playing checkers” makes its rounds inside the Beltway, the truth is a bigger concern:
Putin is playing Stalin and Obama is playing Carter.
What we need from our president in national security is a Truman, a Churchill, a Thatcher, a Reagan—someone that a Khrushchev, Brezhnev, or Putin has no choice but to respect.
Because even though Putin doesn’t bother anymore to care what Obama is doing or thinking, now that he has pegged him as an easy mark, China and Iran are watching. Closely.
How did we get to this point?
High School Politics in Washington
Americans elect the “cool” candidate as president in the Entertainment Age. Carter was cooler than Ford, Reagan was cooler than Carter and Mondale, Bush I was cooler than Dukakis but not as cool as Clinton, Clinton was cooler than Dole, Bush II was cooler than Gore and Kerry, and Obama was cooler than McCain and Romney.
A simple “cool” test (who is more likely to sing, dance, play the saxophone, fuel high school ambitions in the youth, etc.) would have accurately predicted every one of these elections.
It’s High School Musical at the White House.
As for the 2016 presidential election, no potential candidate so far is nearly as “cool” to a majority of the national electorate as Hillary Clinton. Nobody is even close.
The problem is that when it comes to the main Constitutional role of the Chief Executive (keeping the nation safe from foreign aggression), teenage-style “cool” is arguably irrelevant.
The most important trait may well be the ability to effectively size up foreign leaders and project real strength to them. Rahm Emanuel, Mitt Romney, Bill Clinton—Putin would tread more lightly.
But since we are caught in this Entertainment Society where the political parties pick their presidential candidate based on ideology mixed with electability, and then the American voters reject both of these and simply elect the “cool” candidate, maybe the best we can hope for is a president who demands respect—not from the Nobel Prize committee of idealists but from dangerous world leaders like Putin.
Ironically, this is becoming increasingly important as the current Administration drastically cuts the military (and ramps up debt, inflation, and spending on everything else), and as a number of nations become closer in the balance of power to the United States.
More military conflict will certainly happen in the coming two decades. Russia, China and many nations in the Middle East are actively and specifically preparing for this.
The U.S. is doing the opposite—cutting the military and looking for the next Zac Efron as president—hoping that no conflicts come.
But they will.
Oliver DeMille is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling co-author of LeaderShift: A Call for Americans to Finally Stand Up and Lead, the co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.
Among many other works, he is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, The Coming Aristocracy, and FreedomShift: 3 Choices to Reclaim America’s Destiny.
Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.
Category : Blog &Current Events &Foreign Affairs &Government &Leadership &Politics &Uncategorized
Overcoming Obamacare
January 21st, 2014 // 10:00 am @ Oliver DeMille
Do we have an answer yet? Not quite.
But we’re making progress.
A few months ago I suggested that many companies were going to lay off a lot of employees when Obamacare went into effect — starting in October 2013 and increasing for the next eighteen months.
Then I asked for input from readers: How can business owners overcome the negative effects of Obamacare and avoid laying off or shutting down?
A lot of people responded to this question, and many of the suggestions were excellent. Out of all the wise responses, one really struck me, because it showed true out-of-the box entrepreneurial thinking.
It went something like this: The entrepreneurs in our nation need to put their business innovation skills to figuring out a private business model that will provide effective, affordable health care that beats whatever the government is offering.
While this kind of innovation would require major creativity, initiative, and risk, not to mention capitalization, the rewards would be huge.
Actually, another response to my online question may provide part of the answer: Get people thinking health, not health care. This is much less expensive, easy, and effective. It doesn’t cover emergency care, and it won’t work for everyone, nor will it solve the short-term problem faced by small businesses, but it is certainly the right solution for a lot of people. Get a lot healthier.
A combination of these two might just be on to something.
The biggest problem isn’t Obamacare, it’s a generation that doesn’t naturally think of innovative, out-of-the box, entrepreneurial solutions for every major challenge. Humans are amazingly creative — there are real solutions to the Obamacare dilemma. Entrepreneurs need to find them, and make them profitable so they spread.
In fact, the whole reason Obamacare came about is that for a long time insurance companies could collect payments from a client for twenty or thirty years — and then raise the price beyond his ability to pay when a serious health problem came along. In short, health care was a major problem before Obamacare.
That said, there are solutions. Keep thinking like innovators. And keep sharing your creativity.
So, here is my new question: What is the real solution to health care? Write it, and share it…
Oliver DeMille is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling co-author of LeaderShift: A Call for Americans to Finally Stand Up and Lead, the co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.
Among many other works, he is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, The Coming Aristocracy, and FreedomShift: 3 Choices to Reclaim America’s Destiny.
Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.
Category : Blog &Business &Citizenship &Current Events &Entrepreneurship &Government &Politics
The Future of Feminism
January 9th, 2014 // 9:00 am @ Oliver DeMille
It could be over. The whole, centuries-long debate between men and women, as well as between women and women, over the best role for women, may be coming to an end.
Ironically, this hinges not so much on women or men, but on both. And on children too.
Let me explain.
Feminism has progressed through several phases in history.
- First, women demanded voting and other basic equality with men.
- Second, they argued for the basic intrinsic equality of both genders.
- Third, they sought legal equality in the Equal Rights Amendment era.
All of these strategies made sense to men and women, even those who disagreed with the various leaders and agendas of feminism. After all, the idea of seeking equitable treatment and rights is basic to most Americans.
But at some point, starting in the 1980s, feminism took several interesting, and surprising, turns. Most men were shocked by the intensity of the woman vs. woman debate between those who argued that all women should have full-time careers and those who felt that such a choice was a downgrade for women, that their best work was done in the home.
This was followed by the “We Can Have It All” era, where many young women idealized having both full-time careers and all the benefits and rewards of full-time homemaking. One side said this was the ideal, another side argued that this was a mere illusion.
And finally, in the most recent evolution of feminist debates, dubbed “The Mommy Wars” by the media, some promoters of women in careers and some who believe that homemaking is the female ideal faced off in increasingly tense and extremely strong language.
By this point in the dialogue, men were basically left out of the conversation. National reports showed that more women than men are in college, and that men’s financial outlook is in decline while the earning future for women is bright.
Feminism was still a passionate topic, but the battling sides were made up almost exclusively of women.
That brings us to today. We now seem to be entering yet another major era of this discussion, but this time men are back in the conversation. They are front and center, in fact.
Women are increasingly talking about what men should, or shouldn’t, be. The idea seems to be that if men would just get their act together, many of the modern problems faced by women would be solved.
Like past battles, this one tends to anger almost everyone who thinks about it. One side makes the case that women are better off just living independently. They can have men in their life, if they choose, as long as they don’t become dependent on a man.
In fact, this view seems to accept that men will come and go, and that ultimately a woman has herself, her education and career, and a few close (women) friends that she can really depend on.
Her battles, in this narrative, are against enemies and frenemies, who are nearly always other women — not against men.
This worldview shows up in numerous recent movies and a host of articles in women’s magazines. Watch popular women’s talk shows, and this perspective is nearly always accepted as a fundamental — and undebatable — assumption.
On the other side is a growing view that men and women are very different, that each should fully engage their differences, and that both are happiest when this occurs.
As I said, this is ruffling feathers wherever the new view is shared.
Many women who agree with the historical goals of feminism — and men who view themselves as enlightened, modern, sensitive males — find this newly popular perspective corrupt, positively medieval, and above all, baffling.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this new era of discussion about men and women is that the majority view (the “Independent Woman”) patently refuses to even entertain the growing new perspective (“Real Men/Real Women”).
It is similar to when feminism first began, and men just ignored it, discounted it, or perhaps even laughed at it. This is how the current majority Independent Woman crowd is treating the growing Real Man/New Women minority.
In case you haven’t yet heard this new perspective, it goes something like this:
- Men are happiest when they are deeply involved in a chosen life mission that centers around their deepest interests and passions, their life purpose.
- Women want just such a man; anything less is a letdown to them.
- Men want a woman who will support them in this purpose and help them achieve it.
- Women are happiest when they are helping a man who is deeply engrossed in such a life mission, and raising sons who will someday pursue just such a mission and daughters who will help a man do this as well.
For the Independent Woman crowd, the Real Man/Real Woman view sounds a lot like a modern return to the worst elements of old-style patriarchy, the very reason that feminism was invented.
But as feminism proved, just ignoring this growing minority perspective isn’t going to make it go away.
A lot of people, both men and women, swear by this rising view. For them, women are equal to men, and should have all the same opportunities in education and work. And the happiest equal men and women, they maintain, follow these simple guidelines.
Men want a woman who above all wants to support him and raise a family, and women want a man who gives his life to a central purpose and raising a family.
If a man doesn’t have a life mission, a great purpose, he isn’t going to be very happy. And his woman won’t be very impressed with him. Neither will she feel valued or fulfilled in a marriage if her spouse does not depend on her to help in a real, important purpose.
This is the immediate future of feminism, the debate between the Independent Woman viewpoint and the Real Man/Real Woman perspective. Like I said, this is making a lot of people angry.
On the humorous side, this really is a return to the beginning of the whole debate about feminism. The first shall be last and the last shall be first, I guess.
But there is one big difference this time: the Independent Woman crowd is in the majority — at least in the media, academia, government, and other centers of pop culture.
How this difference impacts the debate remains to be seen.
Just to be clear, I agree with the Real Man/Real Woman side of this argument. I’m just fine with men or women being fully independent. I think we should all have the freedom to choose what we want, and the fact that my daughters (I have 5) have as many options as my sons makes me very happy.
I also think that the happiest men are passionately focused on a great life purpose, and the happiest women are married to such men — where they help each other in the most important parts of life.
Are they equal? Of course. Are they different? Of course. Should this be used as an excuse for men to control women, or for women to control men? Of course not.
But here’s the real problem: Our modern society is structured by the elitist class to convince the rest of us not to engage a central life mission or purpose. We are taught to get an education that will give us a job, a career, working for corporations and institutions run by the upper class. We are taught that our great life passions and interests are at best hobbies.
We are taught that well-paid professional drone work is the ideal — for men and for women. We are taught that children should be trained in schools run by the policies of elitists, seeking the goals outlined by elitists for those in the middle and lower classes.
This message is being taught in nearly every school in modern America. It is being promoted from Hollywood, and encouraged by Madison Avenue. It is being increasingly regulated and enforced from Washington.
Worst of all, more and more parents teach this message to their kids: “Get good grades, get into a good college, get a good career, and spend most of your adult hours working for someone else’s profit and power. This is the key to a happy life.”
As long as this lie dominates our society, a majority of men and women are going to miss out on real life. That’s the future of feminism, manhoodism, childhoodism, socialism, and capitalism.
It’s a serious problem.
For men, women, and children.
And the only thing that has any chance of changing it is Real Man/Real Woman ism. Real Men and Real Women find a great life purpose and give their all for it. And, where possible, they do this together. This is the key to a happy life.
That’s where I stand. I hope you do too.
Oliver DeMille is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling co-author of LeaderShift: A Call for Americans to Finally Stand Up and Lead, the co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.
Among many other works, he is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, The Coming Aristocracy, and FreedomShift: 3 Choices to Reclaim America’s Destiny.
Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.
Category : Blog &Culture &Current Events &Family &Generations &History &Politics
